When Amazon Web Services suffered a massive outage in October, a large number of sites and apps, including Canvas, Zoom, ChatGPT, Reddit, and Alexa, stopped working entirely. The reason (a bug in the internal DNS management) quickly cascaded across the globe. Amazon owns upwards of a third of the world’s cloud infrastructure, and the affected section, in northern Virginia, constitutes a data corridor that centrally processes some critical functions for their entire cloud. So problems there essentially mean problems everywhere.
The fact is that Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft not only own an overwhelming majority of the world’s digital clouds and platforms, but also its data centers and international undersea internet cables. It’s through these digital and physical assets that almost the entire earth’s internet traffic pulsates, regardless if it’s (to stick to our sector) a pre-recorded video lecture on YouTube, thesis supervision over Zoom, or access to scientific publications. This extensive, and continuously ongoing, centralization entails – as for any oligopoly – a dramatically weakened resilience against cascading failures and similar breakdowns. So whenever the crisis or war comes to the digital domain, it unfortunately looks rather bleak at the moment.
Add to this that we don’t even need a real crisis. For instance, there seems to be no real obstacle to Donald Trump forcing American Big-Tech companies to throttle access to their cloud services for a Europe trying to assert its laws and rules on their services when used here. Tit for tat, or whatever the international rules of engagement are nowadays. This is particular risky for us, since Sweden is remarkably dependent on US cloud services. As the writer Joakim Öhman recently put it in the magazine Ny Teknik, we’ve “outsourced our digital spine” and “become a digital vassal state to the USA”. At the same time e.g. Denmark is moving in the opposite direction, toward “digital sovereignty”. So our situation isn’t just an inevitable effect of global developments, so much as relatively self-inflicted.
And even if we don’t suddenly lose access to the cloud, organizations still face a slew of additional related problems, not least because of increasing digital crime. Cyber attacks against the Swedish public sector, including universities and colleges, isn’t just increasing in amount and extent, but also constitutes a depressingly frequent item in the news. An effect of this is more demanding legislation – through GDPR, NIS2, etc. – for organizations. Then it’s no wonder that I, as a university teacher, now have to make do with a work computer and an intranet that are so locked down that it’s often unnecessarily complex to complete rather basic work tasks.
“…it’s no wonder that I, as a university teacher, now have to make do with a work computer and an intranet that are so locked down that it’s often unnecessarily complex to complete rather basic work tasks.”
I can go on… Trump’s blocking of financial support for a number of large American research projects has already killed off several digital tools that my colleagues in various subject areas were relying on in their research and teaching. And I barely have room here to mention all the ethical objections to Big Tech’s surveillance capitalism, negative environmental impact and exploitation of workers in poor countries, e.g. content moderators.
So no, whether it winds up coming in the form of a sudden cessation of cloud access, unreasonable demands for organizations, or a purely personal exhaustion with the consequences of our digital addiction, analog solutions are becoming increasingly necessary. Being constantly connected to the internet is simply growing too vulnerable, complex, and problematic. So just like it was beneficial to have familiarized oneself with digital solutions before the pandemic broke out, so it will soon be beneficial to have left the very same behind. I’ve always liked computers, but considering all the problems they’re now bringing about, we need to begin seriously thinking about the alternatives.
Oskar MacGregor,
Senior Lecturer in Informatics at the University of Skövde
